Everlasting Pillars

Twenty-four years ago, just under a year married, we explored these wild roads and trails of Vancouver Island.  Twenty-four years of living and forgiving,  growing and slowing, learning and returning; but up on the island, the 800-year-old trees don’t notice much about that breath of time, they just keep on reaching toward the heavens.  Now three more eternal souls surround us as we walk in awe among –aptly named—Cathedral Forest.  Some of these giants were 300 years old when Columbus landed on North American shores.  Some of them came down in a 1997 storm, still lying where they fell, monuments decaying.


Will we lie where and when we fall to the earth, gone when we return to dust?  Not our souls, certainly—they rise to Light (or descend to eternal darkness if we are not found in Christ).  But the monument that lives on is that which upholds the corners of our generations; it does not need to lie fallow and quickly forgotten.  Will our generations that bear our name remember a godly, righteous walk—the parents, grandparents, great-grandparents- that led them along Lighted paths to the foot of the Cross?

“What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter.”  John 13:7

"We have only a partial view here of God’s dealings, His half-completed, half-developed plan; but all will stand out in fair and graceful proportions in the great finished Temple of Eternity!  Go, in the reign of Israel’s greatest king, to the heights of Lebanon.  See that noble cedar, the pride of its compeers, an old wrestler with northern blasts!  Summer loves to smile upon it, night spangles its feathery foliage with dewdrops, the birds nestle on its branches, the weary pilgrim or wandering shepherd reposes under its shadows from the midday heat or from the furious storm; but all at once it is marked out to fall; the aged denizen of the forest is doomed to succumb to the woodman’s stroke!

As we see the axe making its first gash on its gnarled trunk, then the noble limbs stripped of their branches, and at last the “Tree of God”, as was its distinctive epithet, coming with a crash to the ground, we exclaim against the wanton destruction, the demolition of this proud pillar in the temple of nature.  We are tempted to cry with the prophet, as if inviting the sympathy of every lowlier stem—invoking inanimate things to resent the affront—“Howl, fir tree; for the cedar has fallen!” (Zechariah 11:2)

But wait a little.  Follow that gigantic tree as the workmen of Hiram launch it down the mountainside; thence conveyed in rafts along the blue waters of the Mediterranean; and last of all behold it set a glorious polished beam in the Temple of God.  As you see its destination, placed in the very Holy of Holies, in the diadem of the Great King—say, can you grudge that “the crown of Lebanon” was despoiled, in order that this jewel might have s noble a setting?

That cedar stood as a stately prop in nature’s sanctuary, but “the glory of the latter house was greater than the glory of the former!”

How many of our souls are like these cedars of old!  God’s axes of trial have stripped and bared them.  We see no reason for dealings so dark and mysterious, but He has a noble end and object in view; to set them as everlasting pillars and rafters in His Heavenly Zion; to make them a “crown of glory in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of our God.”  --Macduff